Sylvester Stallone wants Viggo Mortensen to pick up the pen and cavort with ravens in a film he's directing about the life of Edgar Allan Poe. Long known for his dark horror, fantasy and detective tales, Poe also created the first futuristic dystopia in fiction.

Poe penned the dark future tale Mellonta Tauta which is set in the year 2848 as a series of letters written during a balloon voyage across the Atlantic Ocean. These letters satirically comment on the what has happened to the United States during the past thousand years. He'd also written, fourteen years earlier, a story about a man taking a balloon journey to the moon. Seems like Poe really liked hot air for some reason.

Author Thomas Disch posits in his book The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of who claims that Mellonta Tauta firmly roots Edgar Allan Poe as the originator of modern science fiction, since Poe loved exploring different realities, many of them dark and brooding. He re-explored futures similar to that one in Mellonta Tauta in both The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Sceherazade and A Descent into the Maelstrom.

Sylvester Stallone directing a biopic about Edgar Allan Poe? Welcome to your different reality. Hunky Mortensen, star of Lord of the Rings trilogy and the recent Eastern Promises, is reportedly considering taking the role as long as some changes are made to the script. First up will be cutting the scene of Poe toting an M-60 into battle. Quoth the Rambo: "Nevermore."